Validation of the maslach burnout inventory-general survey (MBI-GS) to assess burnout among army personnel of Sri Lanka

Background: The military is a well-known vulnerable occupational setting for burnout. However, due to the lack of a validated tool translated into Sinhala – the country’s primary spoken language, and adapted for the Sri Lankan military context, it is unable to investigate the true burden.
Aim: To validate the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) to assess burnout among Army personnel of Sri Lanka.
Method: Sinhala translation, military culture adaptation, and judgmental validity assessment were per-formed on the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) with the participation of experts. Criterion and construct validity were then examined with a sample of 229 army personnel. They were selected from among Army soldiers who visited the Army Hospital, Colombo for medical fitness assess-ments, using systematic sampling. To evaluate reliability, Cronbach’s alpha was calculated.
Results: It was suggested to remove item 12 from the translated MBI-GS at the cultural adaptation. “Modified two factor model with deleted items six and twelve, plus added correlate error terms” was identified as the best fitting model by the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was generated to assess criterion validity and area under the curve (AUC) was 0.970. At the point of 28.5, sensitivity and specificity were 92.3% and 87.9%, respectively. Satisfactory reliability was demonstrated, Cronbach’s alpha values being greater than 0.7 for all scales.
Conclusions: The MBI-GS translated to Sinhala, culturally adapted and validated was found to be a valid and reliable tool for assessing burnout among Army personnel of Sri Lanka.